New FPGA-Powered Retro Console Re-Creates the PlayStation (arstechnica.com) 46
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [A] company called Retro Remake is reigniting the console wars of the 1990s with its SuperStation one, a new-old game console designed to play original Sony PlayStation games and work with original accessories like controllers and memory cards. Currently available as a $180 pre-order, Retro Remake expects the consoles to ship no later than Q4 of 2025. The base console is modeled on the redesigned PSOne console from mid-2000, released late in the console's lifecycle to appeal to buyers on a budget who couldn't afford a then-new PlayStation 2. The Superstation one includes two PlayStation controller ports and memory card slots on the front, plus a USB-A port. But there are lots of modern amenities on the back, including a USB-C port for power, two USB-A ports, an HDMI port for new TVs, DIN10 and VGA ports that support analog video output, and an Ethernet port. Other analog video outputs, including component and RCA outputs, are located on the sides behind small covers. The console also supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
The Retro Remake SuperStation console offers an optional tray-loading CD drive in a separate "SuperDock" accessory that will allow you to play original game discs. Buyers can reserve the SuperDock with a $5 deposit, with a targeted price of around $40.
The report also notes the console uses an FPGA chip that's "based on the established MiSTer platform, which already has a huge library of console and PC cores available, including but not limited to the Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn." And because it's based on the MiSTer platform, it makes the console "open source from day 1."
The report also notes the console uses an FPGA chip that's "based on the established MiSTer platform, which already has a huge library of console and PC cores available, including but not limited to the Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn." And because it's based on the MiSTer platform, it makes the console "open source from day 1."
The launch was a disaster (Score:4, Interesting)
The launch went badly. It happened in the middle of the night for people in Europe, so unless you were up at 2AM you were not going to get one at $150. Now the price has gone up for no reason.
The details are very light as well. For example, it says it has VGA and "component" output. Is that RGB? At 15kHz for a SCART TV? If it does support that, there are no suitable cables on their website.
It's interesting, and once reviews are out I might look at getting one when the price comes back down to $150. Not paying more than that on principle. Or their other product, the cheaper DE10 board, if that is on sale at the original price. Unfortunately that is pre-order as well and they release it in batches, in the middle of the night when I'm asleep.
Re:The launch was a disaster (Score:4, Informative)
"Component" output usually means Y Pb Pr, which is like S-video with the chroma split further. Depending on the chipset and firmware, it may or may not be possible to switch it to output RGB.
Component is somehow better than RGB, and it was the cool thing when DVD came out in the late '90s. It's 15KHz, but also supports 16:9 anamorphic mode. At least in the US, 15KHz analog RGB mostly passed us by, and component sealed the deal. I can understand why VGA CRT monitors wouldn't support it, but I'm still sad that LCD monitors rarely did.
Re: (Score:2)
Someone on Reddit mentioned that it is the same as the Sega Saturn port, so it does support RGB.
RGB may be better for DVD as that encodes images as YUV, but I'm not sure how many players can output that rather than just converting to RGB. For games though RGB is going to be superior. That's what they use internally.
Re: (Score:2)
If it supports VGA it presumably supports RGB? I mean, that's what's literally coming out of VGA, analog RGB signals?
The component output (I don't see it on the picture, is that what the DIN10 port is?) is a nice-to-have because a lot of US TVs support it, both early 2000s high end CRTs and most LCDs and Plasma screens. You also have the HDMI option of course.
Googling, all three output systems have SCART adapters for a variety of different prices, it certainly doesn't look as if it'd be expensive to hook up
Re: (Score:2)
VGA is 31KHz though. You need 15kHz for normal TVs and older computer monitors.
Games designed for 15kHz don't look right on a VGA screen, the pixels are too well defined. I know Mister allows for some blurring and scanline simulation, but the point is to use a period correct display.
Re: (Score:2)
This can output the original 15kHz signal. It also has the option to enable a simple line doubler to convert the signal to 31kHz so it will work on a VGA monitor that doesn't support multi sync.
But a cheap consumer VGA monitor will give a very similar look to the PVM and BVM displays that retro gamers chase after. The only issue is original lightguns won't work on the 31kHz display. But some later ED and HD CRT TVs models will convert everything to a 31khz signal and cause the same issue.
Some games on the G
Re: (Score:2)
I seem to be super sensitive to displays, e.g. I can see the difference between 4k and 8k.
I used to use a scandoubler back in the day with my Amiga and games never looked quite right on a VGA monitor, even a cheap one. I don't have a working PVM at the moment but I don't recall them looking like VGA. They were not designed for high resolutions, the shadow mask will have been different.
Re: (Score:2)
I didn't think of that (technically the VGA standard isn't frequency limited, but most monitors can't take a 15kHz signal so they default to 31kHz at minimum, so I take the correction.)
Re: The launch was a disaster (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not seeing those on the console: https://retroremake.co/pages/s... [retroremake.co]
Left to right I'm seeing: Power (USB-C from the looks of things), two USB-As, HDMI, "DIN10" (?), VGA, an analog audio jack (probably 3.5mm), and an Ethernet port. Am I looking at the wrong thing?
(AmiMojo's already pointed out the VGA output is probably at an incompatible frequency, so in fairness my comment was wrong, but I'm curious to know if I'm looking at the wrong picture.)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
At the bottom of the page there is an image carousel, if you cycle through them you'll see there are port covers on the two sides.
One has the five RCA jacks for Component video and audio. The other has the yellow for composite video and the two audio jacks, along with a SPDIF digital audio connector.
The VGA output is configurable to either 15kHz or 31kHz. Or even inbetween if you are running an arcade core as many of those use non-standard odd ball frequencies.
I recommend anyone that's interested, check out
Re: (Score:2)
> At the bottom of the page there is an image carousel, if you cycle through them you'll see there are port covers on the two sides.
Got it, thanks!
> The VGA output is configurable to either 15kHz or 31kHz. Or even inbetween if you are running an arcade core as many of those use non-standard odd ball frequencies.
Oh that is good! That answers that issue and means there's a guaranteed source of RGB.
Thanks for the MiST information, I'm definitely going to check that out. This seems one of the better proje
Re: (Score:2)
Heads up that while MiSTer did spin off of MiST, it's very much it's own thing now. MiST was a custom board that originally targeted the Atari ST, thus My ST. And it spread to other systems.
MiSTer used a commercial developer board anyone could easily buy that gave more resources and capabilities to less than 1/2 the cost of the custom board the MiST had. And then exploded in terms of support. The FPGA cores are being ported to other boards as well, but MiSTer became a standard everyone rallied around.
This p
Re: (Score:2)
> People will continue to argue it's not 100% exact per original hardware. But different tolerances in capacitors and clock crystals in original hardware makes it so two "real" pieces are hardware don't do the exact same thing.
Totally get it. I suspect I'm happier with an FPGA solution than a Pi based software one because there's still the ability to support features that cannot be done in software. For example an FPGA Amiga implementation could, theoretically, have a disk drive interface and even suppor
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not into the Amiga scene, so I'm not sure where it ended up. But someone had a floppy drive interface working on the Amiga core. https://www.amibay.com/threads/mister-floppy-amiga-is-amazing.2442933/ [amibay.com]
The C64 core supposedly also has real drive support. There's also an optional audio input add-on the C64 core can use so you can load stuff from tape if you really wanted to.
The great part is all of this stuff is written in a hardware design language (HDL). If all of the corner cases are worked out, so all o
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This is a new custom designed board that uses the MiSTer framework. Rather than using the Terasic DE-10 Nano which was created as a development board. This is a new layout with the same functionality.
Previous boards for the MiSTer were limited in terms of size and layout to match the foot print of the DE-10 Nano. So you had cables spidering out from every side.
This new version has the majority of the IO at the back, and a USB port and the PSX controller and memory card ports on the front. The two sides do h
Re: (Score:1)
The $150 price is good. What isn't good is selling out of them before Europe wakes up and then charging us $75 more for the same thing. Actually slightly worse, you don't get the Founder's Edition stuff, although admittedly it's just nicer packaging.
Re: (Score:2)
Where's this $75 more coming from? It's currently available for $30. The shipping always always high. Someone I know in the US ordered at $150, and it was $196 after sales tax, the $5 addon dock deposit and $36 for shipping.
Re: (Score:2)
I see they have a sale on, the full price is $75 more but you can currently get it down to only $30 more.
I think that the Mister Pi might be a better option for anyone happy to do a bit of assembly. This thing is max 128MB RAM which isn't enough for some cores. 128MB is enough for most stuff, and the expansion options on this one seem good enough (not really bothered about the optical drive but the USB ports on the dock are nice... Presumably a USB hub so you could add your own), but some GPIOs for classic
Re: (Score:2)
The MiSTer Pi is the exact same thing as this. Only a handful of consoles NeoGeo, N64, GBA will make use of over 64MB due to a small number of games being up to 64MB.
The computer cores can utilize more, but those generally run fine using the 1GB of onboard DDR3 RAM.
There's mention of dual RAM. That's using two RAM modules, but it has nothing to do with RAM capacity. It's down to RAM bandwidth limits. While a core is in development it's easier to use the extra bandwidth and get things into a complete stable
Re: The launch was a disaster (Score:2)
They were available until afternoon following day.
Re: (Score:1)
Why aren't they available now? It's not like they have manufactured a limited number. This is a pre-order before manufacturing starts, shipping Q3.
Re: The launch was a disaster (Score:2)
They are available now.
Re: (Score:2)
The website says out out of stock. Only the more expensive ones are available now.
Re: The launch was a disaster (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
This emulates far more than just Playstations. The emulation tends to be better too. While in theory software can be as good, in practice it's very hard to replicate the timing precisely with all the different parts of the system interacting.
Re: (Score:3)
I have some bad news for you. All PS3 revisions use only software emulation for PS1 games. This is why every single revision supports playing games off original PS1 CDs.
PS2 has both the CPU and GPU as hardware, the GPU only as hardware, or all done in software depending on the revision. But even the "full hardware" versions have software pieces in them that are 100% accurate that do cause issues in a handful of games.
This FPGA core for the PS1 does some extra buffering on audio playback due to limited memor
Re: (Score:2)
If the DIN10 has a Genesis/Mega Drive 2 style pinout (which I think is likely), then it can output 15 kHz RGBS over SCART using a commonly available cable.
But I wonder whether the HD15 connector outputs true 31 kHz VGA, or a 15kHz VGA-like signal.
Re: (Score:2)
Read up on the MiSTer project for specific details. But the HD15 is configurable through an INI file. It does both 15 and 31kHz. And other configuration options lets it switch from RGB to component output on the port.
It can also be switched from direct analog output, to using the same scaler as the HDMI port. So you can get SVGA resolutions out of it.
Re: (Score:3)
There will never be a perfect time. If you launch it at a reasonable time in North America, it would be an awful time for Asia and Europe. And then you can apply that for good times in Asia and Europe as well. That is the nature of international - at some point or another someone is going to be inconvenienced - be it 5
Re: (Score:1)
That's why I will probably cancel my pre-order and get something else. I don't like these questionable sales tactics, and I really don't like being charged more than the last guy for no good reason.
QMTech are another Chinese company that make an alternative to the DE10 boards, and they are about the same price or a little bit cheaper than Taki Udon. They sell them on AliExpress too which makes life a lot easier, and have them in stock instead of a pre-order for Q4. They are on holiday for New Year at the mo
FPGA is not a magic bullet (Score:4, Insightful)
It is not a exact 1:1 replica of the original circuit, and it is based on the same reverse engineering work as the software emulators, with the same mistakes.
It do have some advantages like all the parallelism you get with the FPGA, and not having to deal with a double buffered audio chip that will introduce some lag, but the PR team of these devices like to pretend it is an exact replica of the system when is more akin to a clone system, like all those NES on a chip solutions.
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you for the corrections
Is this seriously something people want? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. Sort of. If the price is right and the original is old enough for there to be a nostalgia market.
I still play Commodore 64 games in an emulator once in a while, and have one of those hundreds-in-one arcade boxes that gets the same amount of play.
Re: (Score:2)
Just emulate it (Score:2)
It makes no sense to get a device that retains the original hardware's limitations, when emulation can make games look massively better. [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Or you can emulate the original hardware's limitations as well
How authentic? (Score:2)
How authentic an experience is this going to be?
Will I have to turn it upside-down to keep it working after a couple of years?
Before, there was no-retrocomputing, retrogaming (Score:2)
my oh my (Score:1)